Hmm, well
that would explain a lot...

: : : : : : The last post got me to thinking... How did Cockney Londoners above
all other Londoners come to be so poetic? There's the ryhyming slang or course
and terms like clock and peculiar things like calling everyone "Jon", "Alright
Jon?"

: : : : : : I'm sure there must be historical reasons. I'm currently reading
An Autobiography of London by Peter Ackroyd. My only surmise is that the fact
that the East End is a very old part of London - but is there anything more to
it than that?

: : : : : I was under the impression that rhyming slang arose,
as with many other types of argot, as a deliberate means of communicating with
one's fellow locals, whilst excluding outsiders who might be present at the same
time, presumably to gain some kind of advantage. So, effectively a type of "thieves'
cant" - not that I'm suggesting that inhabitants of the East End of London are
uniformly vliiainous. I'm sure that somewhere there must be a few saintly souls...
:)

: : : : They are really hard to understand anyway. In another life, Word
Camel worked in an East End pub where she outraged the regulars by serving them
bizarre mixtures of lime and stout because that's what it sounded like they were
saying. (Even after they repeated it slowly) ;)

: : : 1. What WERE they saying?
:
: : 2. There are other examples of poverty-stricken or otherwise totem-pole-bottom
groups developing their own slang, even creating something close to an art form
out of language, one of the few materials available to them.

:
: I seem to recall they wanted a mix of a stout or dark ale and a lighter lager.
I probably confused it with a shandy. A remarkable number of people ordered shandies,
a mix if lager and sickly sweet lime. To me they always tasted like a lime flavoured
popsicle gone horribly wrong. But they were very popular with both men and women,
though it's thought of mainly as something women order.

: Hmmm. I can't decipher
the "wight-n-wime-finning-epp" at all - I always thought that the drint required
was called a "light & bitter". HOWEVER, for the absolute record, a shandy is definitively
NOT a mix of lager with lime cordial - that's (unimaginatively enough) a lager
and lime. A shandy is an approximately 50/50 mix of beer (either lager or more
usually bitter) and lemonade. This is not to be confused with a "top", which is
a near full pint of beer with just the last half inch "topped off" with lemondade.
I have also seen some Brits debase themselves by ordering a "lager and black"
- lager mixed with blackcurrant syrup. Any of the above concoctions would be deeply
frowned upon by anyone with the slightest degree of bar cred.

And might in some
small way account for the fact that the publican in my notorious pub, a fellow
called Terry, who had "love' and 'hate' tatooed on his knuckles, absconded to
Spain with all the money in the pub, leaving his wife baby. By coincidence he
drank the black current drink described above and played "Bare Footing" on the
Jukebox at least three times and hour.